present its mystical significance and
solemnity, that all our actions are piling up for us future possessions:
'treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath'; or, contrariwise,
'glory, immortality, honour, eternal life.' We are like men digging a
trench on one side of a hedge and flinging the spadefuls over to the
other. They are all being piled up behind the barrier, and when we go
round the end of it we shall find them all waiting for us.

Then the Apostle superimposes upon this another metaphor. He does not
care to unravel it. 'Laying up in store for themselves a store,' he
would have said if he had been a pedant, 'which is also a good
foundation.' Now I take it that that does not mean a basis for hope, or
anything of that sort, but that it conveys this thought, that our
actions here are putting in the foundations on which the eternal
building of our future life shall be reared. When a man excavates and
lays the first courses of the stones of his building, he thereby
determines every successive stage of it, until the headstone is brought
forth with rejoicing. We are laying foundations in that profound sense
in this world. Our nature takes a set here, and I fail to see any reason
cognisable by us why that ply of the nature should ever be taken out of
it in any future. I do not dogmatise; but it seems to me that all that
we do know of life and of God's dealings in regard to man leads us to
suppose that the next world is a world of continuations, not of
beginnings; that it is the second volume of the book, and hangs
logically and necessarily upon the first that was finished when a man
died. Our lives here and hereafter appear to me to be like some
geometrical figure that wants two sheets of paper for its completion:
on the first the lines run up to the margin, and on the second they are
carried on in the direction which was manifest in the section that was
visible here.

And so, dear friends, let us remember that this is the reason why our
smallest acts are so tremendous that by our actions we are making
character, and that character is destiny, here and hereafter. You are
putting in the foundations of the building that you have to live in; see
that they are of such a sort as will support a house eternal in the
heavens.

The last of the metaphors under which the Apostle suggests the one idea
is that our conduct here determines our capacity to lay hold of the
prize. It seems to me that the same allusion is lingering i